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This Is Not Why I Read This Blog, Ackerman

10/02/2011

I swear I'm not trolling. I'm sympathetic to #OccupyWallStreet. I just have logistics questions.

1. What was the rationale for a demonstration seeking to physically occupy Wall Street to cross into Brooklyn?

2. How did the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge actually arrest 700 people? In this video, the police are vastly outnumbered. If these arrest figures are correct, these were some orderly-ass protesters who would have had to willfully submit to arrest, even after the nets came out on the bridge. Which makes reported incidents of brutality seem even less justified. (Not that police brutality is ever justified, but you get my point, I hope.)

Like I said: logistics questions. I'm not seeing news accounts of the arrests explain.

Meanwhile, Micah Sifry explains how and why he went from #occupywallstreet skeptic to supporter.

09/24/2011

You have to read Moe Tkacik sentences like Talmudic passages to even begin to understand their meaning, but it's not difficult to grasp her visceral contempt for Tim Geithner:

The deadly mix of arrogance, ruthlessness and impunity Geithner radiates is of a magnitude so at odds with his adolescent physicality—as Mike Barnicle put it, “he has the eyes of the shoplifter”—that his public appearances invariably beg the question, who is the Dr. Evil to this clearly overcompensating loser son who is lucky to have more hair than Seth Green?

So should I bother reading Suskind's book? Matthew Yglesias has convinced me I should read some far wonkier text from an economics professor but I've already forgotten the dude's name. And my Kindle's right there...

08/01/2011

By 1997, the New York City Transit Authority was taking in $38 million from underground advertising sales. That was around the time CBS Outdoor, one of the companies that sells space on the city’s behalf, began leasing entire stations. They call the scheme “station domination,” and promote it as “suited to advertisers who have an umbrella message to impart with multiple facets.”

A subjective aesthetic observation: the uniform themes presented "station domination" is more pleasing to the eye than a cacophony of disjointed, themeless advertisements. From the perspective of Colin's thesis, it's a shrewd, insidious ploy that gives consumer messages the veneer of public art. But it would hardly be insidious if it wasn't effective.

But no "station domination" can ever be as beautiful as the "slideshow" effect that appears on the Q line outside the DeKalb Avenue station, where the darkened pillars of the subway tunnel interrupt a series of graffiti murals on a lighted background. I was lucky enough to grow up on the Q line back when it was the D, where the above-ground tracks extending into Brooklyn after 7th Avenue display the immortal work of SANE SMITH and other legends.

Urban policy question: does anyone know if there is a correllation between advertising revenue collected by transportation boards/agencies/authorities and public transit fare prices? I imagine that those boards/agencies/authorities claim that we'd all be paying $15 for a bus ride if not for advertising. I'd like to know if there's an empirical basis for that claim.